“You’re not telling me thatworked?” Nate demands.
“It did,” she says. “I’m not hungry anymore.” She looks at me. “How long can I go without eating by doing this?”
“You shouldn’t try to go for too long,” I tell her. “This magic gives you strength when you might otherwise have been weak, but you still need nourishment. If you starve yourself, your body will eventually weaken, and then it will take more than basic magic to save you.”
“Advanced magic?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “More advanced than anything I know how to do, that’s for sure.”
She hesitates for a moment. “That baby,” she says. “The one who died.”
“What about it?”
“Could it have been saved by advanced healing magic?”
The suggestion makes me shudder. “Thatreallyisn’t natural, Emlyn. No one is supposed to recall people from the dead.”
“But if it saves lives,” she presses, “then it has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?”
“Imagine how much power it would take to accomplish something like that,” I say. “Greed and magic don’t go well together.”
She picks up a stick. “Can I show you something?” she asks.
“Don’t do it, Emlyn,” Nate says sharply. “You don’t know what might happen.”
But Emlyn’s already drawing in the dirt. She sketches out three sigils, and I lean over to study them in the moonlight.
“Do you know what these are?” she asks.
“They’re Moon Caster sigils,” I say. “I recognize the style.” I point to the crescent moon shapes in one of them. “This represents the time of the lunar cycle when they have the most power.”
“But what is it that they do?” Emlyn asks.
I shrug. “No idea. I’ve never seen these ones before,” I say. “Where did you learn them?”
“I found them painted on a wall,” she says. “It looked like they were painted in blood.”
“Inblood?” I repeat. “That’s…I’ve never heard of painting sigils in blood.”
“Your coven didn’t do it, then?”
“If they did, they certainly never told me.”
“But they wouldn’t tell a kid,” Nate says. “That would be the kind of thing they would keep secret, right?”
I shrug. “Maybe,” I say. “Whatever the case, I don’t recognize these shapes. I have no idea what they mean or what they were meant to do.”
Emlyn frowns. Then she wipes them away with her foot.
“I’m hoping to find a coven of Moon Casters,” she says. “Maybe they’ll be able to explain it.”
I shake my head. “Don’t go looking for Moon Casters, Emlyn,” I say. “Moon magic might not be evil by nature, but the covensare. They’ll kill you as soon as they look at you.”
Nate makes eye contact with me, and for the first time, I get the feeling we’re in complete agreement.
Chapter 39
EMLYN